Elton John, Major Tom, and George Clooney might have you believe it’s lonely out in space, but there sure are a lot of satellites.
In 2022, the number of active in-orbit objects increased to nearly 7,000; the satellites support a variety of commercial tasks that call for imaging, precise location, and exact timing.
A June “SpaceTech” report from the professional-services firm Deloitte estimates that the number of sats in lower-earth could grow to more than 40,000 by 2030. The consultancy had another prediction: “We hazard a guess that in the future, every company will likely be a space company.”
Agricultural players, after all, are already using satellites to track crop growth, biotech firms are engineering tissue in microgravity, and even whiskey makers are aging their booze above Earth.
But are IT departments really going to change as new ideas launch to orbit?
Mike Bechtel, managing director and chief futurist with Deloitte Consulting, spoke with IT Brew about how the job of information technology pros is likely to shift—one small step at a time.
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
IT Brew: What about a small business? How will they leverage space?
Mike Bechtel: Let's say I'm a shipper. Where's my train car holding the, you know, sulphate, whatever! The old way is look up in a legacy IT database: “It last departed Tulsa on x,” right? The space-fueled way will be “Real-time satellite intel tells us that it's crossing this bridge in western Texas at this moment.”
To me, that's really the big intersection right now. The first frontier between space tech and IT is satellite-based information [that] is going to give us near-real-time, down-to-the-meter granularity of “Where are my assets? What's the temperature in that square meter of the farm so that I can irrigate there first?” That's beyond the buzzword and down to business.
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IT Brew: How do you envision IT responsibilities changing as companies leverage space tech?
Bechtel: On the computation front, low-Earth orbit satellites and beyond are going to require next-generation networking technologies, concentrated beams of light, and optical networking. Network engineering, as an IT discipline, is going to come back very much into vogue in a world where you’ve got to send your message not just across the planet, but straight to the moon or Mars.
IT Brew: Do you see gesture interfaces, spatial interfaces, and conversational interfaces emerging as leading ways that we will communicate?
Bechtel: The real promise of augmented and virtual reality it's not that it's shiny and it's dazzling. It's that it's simpler than carrying 15 screens around with you! And so, in turn, spatial computing, AR, VR, metaverse, pick your term, this idea of digital superimposed on physical? That's simpler. And so it's somewhat inevitable. Space tech sort of turns up the gas on that inevitability…I've got gloves on, and it's -50 outside. I'm gonna go ahead and want to talk to a machine, or gesture to a machine, rather than be tied to one.
IT Brew: Any closing thoughts on what's the most important takeaway from your report for our IT readers?
Bechtel: Trillions are going to be made by pioneering companies who really realize that space is the ultimate emerging market. One day somebody is going to look back and look at a global business as a small business. And that's really the purpose of this report: to say in the same way to companies who shrugged off IT as the billion maker 50 years ago: Companies would be loath to shake off space tech as the trillion maker 50 years from now.